Actually it would have no such effect. Nvidia and ATI do not care about Linux home users, they are such an insignificant market they are not even worth discussing (at this point in time). They do care about Linux users in the enterprise though (think WETA, LucasArts, etc). Now what do you think the response of those companies would be? Would it be (A) put pressure on ATI/Nvidia to open source their code on threat of not buying their product (and switching to what? SGI stuff?) or would it be (B) not care one way or the other because the distribution they purchase (or produce in house) removes this annoying "feature".
I'm thinking "B". This would be a truly pointless and impotent gesture on the part of the kernel devs. Start pissing off users and it Linux WILL fork. And the fork with all the politically motivated restrictions on what the users can and cannot do will rightfully fail. I'm all for getting the video drivers opened up but the "I'm gonna take my ball and go home" approach clearly would not work. The Kernel Devs are not 400lb gorillas that can push huge companies around yet, nor will they ever be. This is a feature (not a bug) of open source code. Nobody is gonna be holding anyone ransom with this kind of weak threat.
Fortunately it seems Linus sees that pretty clearly.
Google will never sue over patents for the same reasons no software giants sue over patents. Because everyone is violating them. Google sues Microsoft and Yahoo, Microsoft and Yahoo sue right back. If Google or Microsoft, or whoever, is "not doing well" a stupid move like getting sucked into patent litigation would just be finishing off the job.
You did not think that through all the way.
Google will sue over software patents the second that the income they could expect to get from those lawsuits exceeds the income they expect to gain from their software. Right now they feel that building their software portfolio is a much better revenue stream, but that does not mean that things cannot change.
That's why the only people you see initiating patent lawsuits are these little patent clearinghouses that buy up patents from small software companies, but don't own any IP. That way they can sue over patent violations, without having any IP that can be sued back for patent violations.
Right, but do the math. Creating software is significantly more expensive (and fraught with uncertainty regarding future income) than licensing a patent. If Office and Windows sales dropped so low that MS felt it could get more money by not selling any more software and instead using it's vast patent portfolio to export money from those who do produce software, doing so would be a no-brainer.
Kind of short sighted of him wasn't it? To only say it to a small group of people living in a specific area. So is he the God of everyone or just the God of those chosen few? Who then is the God of the others? There was not life only in the Middle East 2000 years ago you know...
And where then did these other religions come from? Many of which are demonstrably older than the "Yahweh" and "Asherah" based religions that became Judaism. Why do you not follow one of those religions? Was it entirely because you follow the religion of your parents? how fortunate you lucked out and were born into the correct one.
Frankly, if God's current plan is to send Jesus to a patch of desert and convince some followers that he died for their sins, it was not very well thought out was it? If God's single main rule is that the biggest asshole on earth can get into the kingdom of heaven simply by believing that Jesus died for his sins, and that the most noble, honorable, peaceful, and (dare I say) most Jesus-like people would be condemned to eternal hell fire if they happen to not believe that, then God is a emotionally-retarded asshole and this world he created is better off without him, no? Especially if his followers are willing to kill otherwise innocent people for not worshiping him the exact same way their parents taught them to.
Really, why go to all the trouble to giving people free will and intelligence if we are to be punished for using it?
I'm not an atheist, I believe in God, but I refuse to believe in a God with the mentality of a 4 year old. This universe is too well constructed and complicated for a rank amateur to have designed it.
God doesn't care what religion you are, so long as you are a good person. How do you know that?
Here is my approach on that.
Let us take as a given that God exists for the purposes of this conversation.
If God is like the GP suggests, a being of benevolence who wants everyone to get along, help each other, and generally "be excellent to each other" than I am all for it. I will try to live my life by these principles, in theory (a really amusing phrase to interject in here) God would welcome me into heaven as one of the "good ones".
No if God is as some believe, a jealous and vengeful being who most desires that we forcibly convert or kill others solely on the basis that they call him by a different name or worship him in a different way, well screw that. I want no part of it. If that is God than I do reject him and will damn well live my life the way I described earlier. It is his own fault, if he wanted mindless zombies to worship him then he should not have made me more emotionally mature than himself.
Here is a fun thought experiment, imagine there is a school for Gods, and one of the projects is to create a planet populated with people you create. You must create them with free will and intelligence but approach different groups of them early on (each time taking a different form) and tell them about yourself and create a religion, but each religion must be very similar and compatible. Then set them loose and see if they can co-exist and figure out that they are all worshiping the same God. If that were the case this God flunked, we all mangled our religions to be incompatible.
Or perhaps the religions started out vastly different, and were even intentionally intolerant. Maybe the assignment is to create a people who are (in the long run) intelligent and mature enough to figure out what is truly important to society as a whole and to even "reject" the original religions (or at least the intolerant aspects of them) in favor of peacefully coexisting. Hopefully God has some more time before it is "pencils down" and we are graded, because we are not quite ready.
Google will never enforce the patent, so its probably moot...
That is some scary thinking. Of course it would be silly for them not to enforce the patent now, they don't need to. What happens down the road though when google is not doing so well and stockholders and calling for blood? They will leverage any assets they have to turn a profit, they have little other choice. Then we will see just how damaging these "patent portfolios" can be.
We will never see IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, or any other company with a huge patent portfolio go out of business under the current patent system. If all else fails, they will turn into the ultimate leech, a patent holding company bleeding off of everyone else. They stockholders will demand it, to not leverage an advantage they have when other people's money is at stake is criminal in the eyes of business.
As a c programmer trying to learn Java I grabbed a couple of books and looked at a lot of online tutorials. The one book that really "opened it up" for me was O'Reilly's "Java Network Programming". Mostly because I was not the least bit interested in writing GUI apps and every other "learn to program Java" book I found figured all you really want to do is learn to write an MS Paint clone. I understand having a real life example to teach concepts (and OO programming in general was hard for me at first) but I have a hard time getting into it if I am totally disinterested in the examples. Network Programming just seemed to present everything better and used examples that I could see relevance in.
The way I learn now is by grabbing good code (various Apache java projects have a lot of good code in them) and reading it, while referencing Sun's online API docs.
In any case, I doubt any other modern presidents have done anything like Bush's varied shenanigans, for two reasons. The first is Richard Nixon. The second is Plausible Deniability. And Bush is almost certinally the first to president to order it on such a massive scale.
Absolutely not, I am certainly not trying to excuse Bush's totally inexcusable actions by pointing out that others did similar things. And of course Bush has been much more blatant about what he is doing and is doing it on a vastly more terrifying scale than anyone previously.
What I AM saying however is that to pretend that the Democrats are pro-privacy and would never abuse power in a similar way is the height of ignorance. The party in power wants more of it, the opposition party wants to pretend to be on your (the voter's) side against the big bad evil majority party until they get their hands on some of that power. If you want to vote democrat because they will abuse power and trample the constitution less than the Republicans have been, then by all means do it, with my blessing. But don't delude yourself into thinking they care about the constitution beyond using it as a way to attack Bush. Once elected, they will totally forget their opposition to his heavy handed tactics.
Yes, the clipper chip was a fantastically horrible idea on many fronts, but it was still a far cry from making privacy "illegal", as you first stated.
The clipper chip itself would not obviously, but if you read the declassified memos and government reports the chip was part of a larger scheme to outlaw all private research and development in cryptography. The NSA was making the legal argument that crypto was exclusively their domain and nobody else was allowed to play. The game plan was to immediately classify any crypto that was produced outside of their ivory tower. So no, privacy itself would not be illegal but attempting to use math to ensure your privacy would have been.
And this administration has gone waaaay beyond the Clipper with their secret prisons, torture, warrantless spying, no trials for prisoners, etc etc.
Agreed, but only because they were the first to have the balls to try it (and post 9/11 political environment which made it palpable), not because the Democrats have always been to noble and virtuous to ever consider such things. I will however concede that they as a party would be less likely to carry it to the sick extreme that Bush and Co. have. "Lesser of two evils" and all that.
I'm aware of xfce and blackbox and the likes, they are nice, but if you want to run mainstream software that require KDE libraries, you're still hosed.
You are also hosed if you want to run Quake3 on a 486, but I don't see the problem.
Are you arguing that software should never take advantage of available hardware for fear that someone out there may not be able to run it? To me the beauty of open source is that there IS software out to run on pretty much anything. You can still use an Sun Ultra1 as a decent workstation as long as you do not have illusions of running openoffice, mozilla, and xgl 3d window managers on it at lightening speed. Open source has given us alternatives such as abiword, dillo, and the like for those cases.
But in the case of FF for Windows, the problem is that Win9x users (and there are many left) will find themselves in the same situation they were with IE: they'll have to keep running the latest older version of the browser that works with their OS, which will quickly become out of date.
These people are running an 11, 8, or 6 year old OS, all of which have been out of date, unsupported, and full of unpatched bugs and vulnerabilities for a long time now. Why on earth would having the absolute latest browser be a concern?
I hope someone will fork off a Win9x tree of FF and keep developing it, otherwise it would mean OSS is no better than Microsoft with regard to software obsolescence.
If it is needed badly enough, I am sure someone will. However the OSS community did not make the decision to make Win9x obsolete and change the existing versions of windows in such a way that they are incompatible (from a development perspective), Microsoft did.
Yeah good idea, we KNOW for a fact that they use the no fly list to harass people they don't like, I am sure anyone who responds negatively gets a couple points added against them on the score. I mean really, why not? There is no oversight, no way to view or attempt to correct it. Why on earth WOULDN'T they use it on a whim to punish those who disagree with them. Look at it from their perspective, they feel they are protecting the country and everyone who disagrees with them wishes them to be out of a job and wants us all to be less safe. It probably is not much of a logical leap in their minds to think dissenters could be dangerous an deserve a few more Terror Points (tm).
What, you didn't think it was to actually stop terrorists did you? We already know the CIA does not let actual known terrorists on that list because circulating their names widely would be a security violation. The no fly list has one intended purpose: Making you think they are doing something about terrorism. Anyone who thinks about it for a minute knows it is a "security theater" joke (like everything else the TSA does), but most people would rather just watch NASCAR and assume the government is looking out for them in a competent way.
It seems an added side effect of the millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on this list was that it provides a nice legal way of harassing people they don't like. I don't understand how any of this can come as a surprise to someone.
Seriously - what apart from science/technology (and the things science/technology make possible) are you leading the world in?
Entertainment, which is probably why we are passing laws to help that industry while damaging any that are perceived as potential threats (read: technology).
Realistically, there are a couple of problems with this.
(1) a terrorist attack will jam up cellular lines anyway. Did you try placing a call on 9/11? It was damn near impossible.
(2) Cell phones are not the only form of communication, we also have regular phones, and the Internet, and (when all else fails) ham radio operators.
(3) The Media, while arguably under a bit of control by the government (or in the case of Fox News complete), still chomps at the bit whenever they smell coverup or any disaster which has been made worse or not immediately fixed by the government. Remember how many reports of murders, rape, and other horrific crimes were repeated during Katrina? Remember how many of them turned out to be true?
All told, I have no doubt the DHS would love to exercise complete and total information control when it comes to this sort of thing, but I doubt they are thinking that just jamming cell phones is the way to go. Their line of thinking is probably more along the lines of disrupting communication when moving in on a suspected terrorists to prevent him/her from tipping others off of a cell compromise or something like that. Or if we want to play 'security theater' it is probably to keep cell phone triggered bombs from going off.
I'm sure what is topping the Police Christmas Wish List this year is a cell phone CAMERA jamming device. Cell phones themselves are likely of little concern, but those damn cameras are causing nothing but trouble.
It was made perfectly clear during the meeting that parts of the US government, at least the two represented at the meeting, strongly disapprove of Tor - and in particular, thought that research universities such as IU, MIT, Georgia Tech, Harvard and others have no business supporting such projects.
I wonder how they feel about TOR being a naval research project.
Actually, if you (and the subset of passionate, yet ignorant democrats who started this "controversy" in preparation for the elections) had actually read the relevant UNCLASSIFIED executive orders, you would have realized that there was nothing illegal about NSA activities whatsoever.
His activities are most certainly in violation of the FISA laws, which allow for warrant less wiretapping only for 72 hours during which time a warrant MUST be applied for along with an explanation of why the wiretapping was so urgent.
His position is basically that during a time of war, the law basically does not apply to the executive branch. Bush can literally do no wrong as long as he declares us to be at war and his actions are to "keep us safe". Executive Orders are really the bane of any democracy, and I hated them when Clinton used them left and right also. The idea that the executive branch can circumvent the entire legislative process by just unilaterally declaring laws is pretty messed up.
Either way, it seems most legal scholars (including the whole of the ABA) believe the program to be illegal. And while there is debate, it is certainly the the cut and dry "just read the law and you will clearly see" argument you are putting forward.
The idea with the Clipper chip was to give the government a backdoor to spy on communications, yes, but unlike they NSA program, they would have still needed warrants to tap in.
Yes, and we know that GW Bush was the first President to ever engaging in spying without warrants (he was the first to proudly admit it though).
The clipper chip was part of a larger initiative which did involve outlawing private research into cryptography, which the NSA deemed to be their sole domain. Go read "The Electronic Privacy Papers" it is quite and interesting collection of position papers and declassified government documents.
The implications for business would also have been huge. No non-US company in their right mind would use such technology on the assumption that the US would naturally be engaging in corporate espionage and passing any helpful titbits along to good old US companies. Not not mention the fact that the US does not "own" cryptography and the rest of the world would certainly have stronger, better, and non compromised algorithms which we would have been outlawed from using. The whole e-commerce thing would probably have happened everywhere BUT the US.
Just wait. They're already turning on Bush, talking about how he's not really conservative. They are, of course, correct, but everyone else started pointing that out six fucking years ago. They don't get to disown him after years and years of sucking up.
This is true, and I was really annoyed at the TV talking heads who just woke up after the election and realized that what the republicans have been doing is not "fiscally conservative" and maybe that is what turned off much of their base. Really? hemorrhaging money like a drunken sailor on shore leave is not fiscally conservative? Who knew?
Unfortunately for most people it seems conservative means "against gay marriage, against terrorists, and against abortions" and as long as those three are met, nothing else matters. Sad state of affairs.
I can't believe I voted for Bush the first time. Had I know he would willing to ignore our constitution and way of life in the name of safety, I would have never considered him.
You and me both, but really it was hard to forsee.
I mean, we just went through the Clinton years where Gore was spearheading the clipper initiative which would have effectively make privacy (and all non clipper crypto) illegal and given the government the ability to spy on everything, while having John Ashcroft emerge as the champion of privacy by leading the opposition to the clipper initiative. I really didn't expect the total and complete 180 on the issue.
Now I know better, both parties are want total access to our lives and supreme executive power (all in the name of keeping us safe). They just pretend to be outraged when the other party is in office and expanding those powers. Believe me, if the democrats take the whitehouse next election they will completely forget about their opposition to any spying and the republicians will suddenly oppose it.
What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda.
Of course, and as we well know the government is totally infallible and would never falsely accuse anyone of being a terrorist or anything else. Even when they know they could get away with it because there is absolutely no independent oversight (gotta keep those activist judges out of the loop, they just complicate matters). We have a strict system of checks and balances in this country, and of course habeas corpus and presumption of innocence applies to us all....unless you are a known terrorists. "Known to who" you ask? "What makes one a known terrorist" you ask? Those are dangerous, un-American questions, boy. You best let the President do his work and keep us all safe and not worry about insignificant details like that.
It is not, as some believe, the government wiretapping phone calls internal to the United States.
Nope, absolutely not. I mean, before someone leaked it we did not think they were wiretapping any calls without properly obtaining warrants, but since it was leaked we know that they are wiretapping international calls without warrants. We still think they are not tapping internal calls this way, and what are the chances we would be wrong again?
And when it comes to the Internet, I'm sure those classified NSA server closets that AT&T has are where they keep the doughnuts.
I'd say there's a chance they're doing this in order to say "oh wow, this is way overboard and shouldn't be done any more" and kill the program, just in time for Democrats to not get their hands on it.
You know, it's funny. I have a lot of friends and family who believe Bush can do no wrong (since we are at war and he is protecting us all) with all of these executive power grabs, but their eyes glass over and faces go black when I ask if they would be comfortable with Kerry or Hillery Clinton bringing those same surveillance and detention powers to bear against gun owners, anti-abortion activists, other conservative groups, etc. Did everyone just forget that Bush (who they oddly trust implicitly) will not be in power forever.
"I'm sorry Senator, I cannot comment on the program due to an ongoing Justice Department investigation" - Alberto Gonzales, speaking to the new Democrat controlled congress sometime next year
It was no babe in arms child, it was a teenager, and it was shouting, no physical violence, no mental torture, shouting. I'm a little concerned that you feel that teachers are not allowed to raise their voices at or discipline through raised voice a student.
Disciplining by shouting (did you watch the video, this was not just a raised voice) accomplishes nothing but decreasing respect for the teacher showing he/she has no control.
I'm pleased that the students are - in this frankly isolated case - being held responsible for their actions.
As am I, but I feel it is a shame that the teacher had to descend to their level. They could have been held responsible for their actions either way.
Not the same thing at all. The student in that case did nothing but act in a relatively courteus manner.
Certainly not exactly the same thing, but the student in that case was certainly not acting in a courteous manner. By all accounts, he was being a dick and attempting to provoke a response (probably not nearly as fierce as he got), just like these kids were. Obviously the response was much more outrageous, but it still stands as another example of authority figures who cannot keep their cool and act appropriately in the face of provocation.
Spoken like someone who has never dealt with children/college students.
That is really really funny:)
You wonder why cops, teachers and other public folk "go off". Try it out sometime. I have been in the trenches, after enough people think they can crap on you and expect you to thank them for doing so... well....repect is a two way street - even if you are a kid, especially if you are a kid.
Respect is a two way street, and I have found that (especially with children and teens) letting them see that they got to you and provoked you stooping to their level and yelling/lashing out/etc. is a guaranteed way to lose it.
Did this teacher have no other recourse? No form of discipline at his/her disposal other than yelling? Why not issue a detention, or suspension if warranted? Still being provoked, send the student to the office to deal with the principal. Shows the student that you do not have to deal with their ranting, and shows the rest of the students that you consider it more important to remove disruptions and continue with their education than engage in a pointless yelling match. If that still does not work, you call for school security to remove the student. Ultimately, you will win because even in a worse case scenario, the students is going to be drug out by security/police if they do not stop and do as you ask.
So I will re-iterate my point. If you cannot maintain your cool and handle a disruptive student without screaming back then you should probably not be a teacher. There are plenty of alternatives, but yelling just tells everyone you have lost and have no control.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it would have no such effect. Nvidia and ATI do not care about Linux home users, they are such an insignificant market they are not even worth discussing (at this point in time). They do care about Linux users in the enterprise though (think WETA, LucasArts, etc). Now what do you think the response of those companies would be? Would it be (A) put pressure on ATI/Nvidia to open source their code on threat of not buying their product (and switching to what? SGI stuff?) or would it be (B) not care one way or the other because the distribution they purchase (or produce in house) removes this annoying "feature".
I'm thinking "B". This would be a truly pointless and impotent gesture on the part of the kernel devs. Start pissing off users and it Linux WILL fork. And the fork with all the politically motivated restrictions on what the users can and cannot do will rightfully fail. I'm all for getting the video drivers opened up but the "I'm gonna take my ball and go home" approach clearly would not work. The Kernel Devs are not 400lb gorillas that can push huge companies around yet, nor will they ever be. This is a feature (not a bug) of open source code. Nobody is gonna be holding anyone ransom with this kind of weak threat.
Fortunately it seems Linus sees that pretty clearly.
Finkployd
Google will never sue over patents for the same reasons no software giants sue over patents. Because everyone is violating them. Google sues Microsoft and Yahoo, Microsoft and Yahoo sue right back. If Google or Microsoft, or whoever, is "not doing well" a stupid move like getting sucked into patent litigation would just be finishing off the job.
You did not think that through all the way.
Google will sue over software patents the second that the income they could expect to get from those lawsuits exceeds the income they expect to gain from their software. Right now they feel that building their software portfolio is a much better revenue stream, but that does not mean that things cannot change.
That's why the only people you see initiating patent lawsuits are these little patent clearinghouses that buy up patents from small software companies, but don't own any IP. That way they can sue over patent violations, without having any IP that can be sued back for patent violations.
Right, but do the math. Creating software is significantly more expensive (and fraught with uncertainty regarding future income) than licensing a patent. If Office and Windows sales dropped so low that MS felt it could get more money by not selling any more software and instead using it's vast patent portfolio to export money from those who do produce software, doing so would be a no-brainer.
Finkployd
Kind of short sighted of him wasn't it? To only say it to a small group of people living in a specific area. So is he the God of everyone or just the God of those chosen few? Who then is the God of the others? There was not life only in the Middle East 2000 years ago you know...
And where then did these other religions come from? Many of which are demonstrably older than the "Yahweh" and "Asherah" based religions that became Judaism. Why do you not follow one of those religions? Was it entirely because you follow the religion of your parents? how fortunate you lucked out and were born into the correct one.
Frankly, if God's current plan is to send Jesus to a patch of desert and convince some followers that he died for their sins, it was not very well thought out was it? If God's single main rule is that the biggest asshole on earth can get into the kingdom of heaven simply by believing that Jesus died for his sins, and that the most noble, honorable, peaceful, and (dare I say) most Jesus-like people would be condemned to eternal hell fire if they happen to not believe that, then God is a emotionally-retarded asshole and this world he created is better off without him, no? Especially if his followers are willing to kill otherwise innocent people for not worshiping him the exact same way their parents taught them to.
Really, why go to all the trouble to giving people free will and intelligence if we are to be punished for using it?
I'm not an atheist, I believe in God, but I refuse to believe in a God with the mentality of a 4 year old. This universe is too well constructed and complicated for a rank amateur to have designed it.
Finkployd
God doesn't care what religion you are, so long as you are a good person.
How do you know that?
Here is my approach on that.
Let us take as a given that God exists for the purposes of this conversation.
If God is like the GP suggests, a being of benevolence who wants everyone to get along, help each other, and generally "be excellent to each other" than I am all for it. I will try to live my life by these principles, in theory (a really amusing phrase to interject in here) God would welcome me into heaven as one of the "good ones".
No if God is as some believe, a jealous and vengeful being who most desires that we forcibly convert or kill others solely on the basis that they call him by a different name or worship him in a different way, well screw that. I want no part of it. If that is God than I do reject him and will damn well live my life the way I described earlier. It is his own fault, if he wanted mindless zombies to worship him then he should not have made me more emotionally mature than himself.
Here is a fun thought experiment, imagine there is a school for Gods, and one of the projects is to create a planet populated with people you create. You must create them with free will and intelligence but approach different groups of them early on (each time taking a different form) and tell them about yourself and create a religion, but each religion must be very similar and compatible. Then set them loose and see if they can co-exist and figure out that they are all worshiping the same God. If that were the case this God flunked, we all mangled our religions to be incompatible.
Or perhaps the religions started out vastly different, and were even intentionally intolerant. Maybe the assignment is to create a people who are (in the long run) intelligent and mature enough to figure out what is truly important to society as a whole and to even "reject" the original religions (or at least the intolerant aspects of them) in favor of peacefully coexisting. Hopefully God has some more time before it is "pencils down" and we are graded, because we are not quite ready.
Finkployd
Google will never enforce the patent, so its probably moot...
That is some scary thinking. Of course it would be silly for them not to enforce the patent now, they don't need to. What happens down the road though when google is not doing so well and stockholders and calling for blood? They will leverage any assets they have to turn a profit, they have little other choice. Then we will see just how damaging these "patent portfolios" can be.
We will never see IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, or any other company with a huge patent portfolio go out of business under the current patent system. If all else fails, they will turn into the ultimate leech, a patent holding company bleeding off of everyone else. They stockholders will demand it, to not leverage an advantage they have when other people's money is at stake is criminal in the eyes of business.
Finkployd
As a c programmer trying to learn Java I grabbed a couple of books and looked at a lot of online tutorials. The one book that really "opened it up" for me was O'Reilly's "Java Network Programming". Mostly because I was not the least bit interested in writing GUI apps and every other "learn to program Java" book I found figured all you really want to do is learn to write an MS Paint clone. I understand having a real life example to teach concepts (and OO programming in general was hard for me at first) but I have a hard time getting into it if I am totally disinterested in the examples. Network Programming just seemed to present everything better and used examples that I could see relevance in.
The way I learn now is by grabbing good code (various Apache java projects have a lot of good code in them) and reading it, while referencing Sun's online API docs.
Just my $0.02
Finkployd
In any case, I doubt any other modern presidents have done anything like Bush's varied shenanigans, for two reasons. The first is Richard Nixon. The second is Plausible Deniability. And Bush is almost certinally the first to president to order it on such a massive scale.
Absolutely not, I am certainly not trying to excuse Bush's totally inexcusable actions by pointing out that others did similar things. And of course Bush has been much more blatant about what he is doing and is doing it on a vastly more terrifying scale than anyone previously.
What I AM saying however is that to pretend that the Democrats are pro-privacy and would never abuse power in a similar way is the height of ignorance. The party in power wants more of it, the opposition party wants to pretend to be on your (the voter's) side against the big bad evil majority party until they get their hands on some of that power. If you want to vote democrat because they will abuse power and trample the constitution less than the Republicans have been, then by all means do it, with my blessing. But don't delude yourself into thinking they care about the constitution beyond using it as a way to attack Bush. Once elected, they will totally forget their opposition to his heavy handed tactics.
Yes, the clipper chip was a fantastically horrible idea on many fronts, but it was still a far cry from making privacy "illegal", as you first stated.
The clipper chip itself would not obviously, but if you read the declassified memos and government reports the chip was part of a larger scheme to outlaw all private research and development in cryptography. The NSA was making the legal argument that crypto was exclusively their domain and nobody else was allowed to play. The game plan was to immediately classify any crypto that was produced outside of their ivory tower. So no, privacy itself would not be illegal but attempting to use math to ensure your privacy would have been.
And this administration has gone waaaay beyond the Clipper with their secret prisons, torture, warrantless spying, no trials for prisoners, etc etc.
Agreed, but only because they were the first to have the balls to try it (and post 9/11 political environment which made it palpable), not because the Democrats have always been to noble and virtuous to ever consider such things. I will however concede that they as a party would be less likely to carry it to the sick extreme that Bush and Co. have. "Lesser of two evils" and all that.
Finkployd
I'm aware of xfce and blackbox and the likes, they are nice, but if you want to run mainstream software that require KDE libraries, you're still hosed.
You are also hosed if you want to run Quake3 on a 486, but I don't see the problem.
Are you arguing that software should never take advantage of available hardware for fear that someone out there may not be able to run it? To me the beauty of open source is that there IS software out to run on pretty much anything. You can still use an Sun Ultra1 as a decent workstation as long as you do not have illusions of running openoffice, mozilla, and xgl 3d window managers on it at lightening speed. Open source has given us alternatives such as abiword, dillo, and the like for those cases.
But in the case of FF for Windows, the problem is that Win9x users (and there are many left) will find themselves in the same situation they were with IE: they'll have to keep running the latest older version of the browser that works with their OS, which will quickly become out of date.
These people are running an 11, 8, or 6 year old OS, all of which have been out of date, unsupported, and full of unpatched bugs and vulnerabilities for a long time now. Why on earth would having the absolute latest browser be a concern?
I hope someone will fork off a Win9x tree of FF and keep developing it, otherwise it would mean OSS is no better than Microsoft with regard to software obsolescence.
If it is needed badly enough, I am sure someone will. However the OSS community did not make the decision to make Win9x obsolete and change the existing versions of windows in such a way that they are incompatible (from a development perspective), Microsoft did.
Finkployd
Yet none are as funny as this
Finkployd
Yeah good idea, we KNOW for a fact that they use the no fly list to harass people they don't like, I am sure anyone who responds negatively gets a couple points added against them on the score. I mean really, why not? There is no oversight, no way to view or attempt to correct it. Why on earth WOULDN'T they use it on a whim to punish those who disagree with them. Look at it from their perspective, they feel they are protecting the country and everyone who disagrees with them wishes them to be out of a job and wants us all to be less safe. It probably is not much of a logical leap in their minds to think dissenters could be dangerous an deserve a few more Terror Points (tm).
Finkployd
What, you didn't think it was to actually stop terrorists did you? We already know the CIA does not let actual known terrorists on that list because circulating their names widely would be a security violation. The no fly list has one intended purpose: Making you think they are doing something about terrorism. Anyone who thinks about it for a minute knows it is a "security theater" joke (like everything else the TSA does), but most people would rather just watch NASCAR and assume the government is looking out for them in a competent way.
It seems an added side effect of the millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on this list was that it provides a nice legal way of harassing people they don't like. I don't understand how any of this can come as a surprise to someone.
Seriously - what apart from science/technology (and the things science/technology make possible) are you leading the world in?
Entertainment, which is probably why we are passing laws to help that industry while damaging any that are perceived as potential threats (read: technology).
Finkployd
Realistically, there are a couple of problems with this.
(1) a terrorist attack will jam up cellular lines anyway. Did you try placing a call on 9/11? It was damn near impossible.
(2) Cell phones are not the only form of communication, we also have regular phones, and the Internet, and (when all else fails) ham radio operators.
(3) The Media, while arguably under a bit of control by the government (or in the case of Fox News complete), still chomps at the bit whenever they smell coverup or any disaster which has been made worse or not immediately fixed by the government. Remember how many reports of murders, rape, and other horrific crimes were repeated during Katrina? Remember how many of them turned out to be true?
All told, I have no doubt the DHS would love to exercise complete and total information control when it comes to this sort of thing, but I doubt they are thinking that just jamming cell phones is the way to go. Their line of thinking is probably more along the lines of disrupting communication when moving in on a suspected terrorists to prevent him/her from tipping others off of a cell compromise or something like that. Or if we want to play 'security theater' it is probably to keep cell phone triggered bombs from going off.
Finkployd
I'm sure what is topping the Police Christmas Wish List this year is a cell phone CAMERA jamming device. Cell phones themselves are likely of little concern, but those damn cameras are causing nothing but trouble.
Finkployd
I bet you didn't read any of the links in the story before commenting :)
He is getting his stuff back.
Finkployd
It was made perfectly clear during the meeting that parts of the US government, at least the two represented at the meeting, strongly disapprove of Tor - and in particular, thought that research universities such as IU, MIT, Georgia Tech, Harvard and others have no business supporting such projects.
I wonder how they feel about TOR being a naval research project.
Actually, if you (and the subset of passionate, yet ignorant democrats who started this "controversy" in preparation for the elections) had actually read the relevant UNCLASSIFIED executive orders, you would have realized that there was nothing illegal about NSA activities whatsoever.
His activities are most certainly in violation of the FISA laws, which allow for warrant less wiretapping only for 72 hours during which time a warrant MUST be applied for along with an explanation of why the wiretapping was so urgent.
His position is basically that during a time of war, the law basically does not apply to the executive branch. Bush can literally do no wrong as long as he declares us to be at war and his actions are to "keep us safe". Executive Orders are really the bane of any democracy, and I hated them when Clinton used them left and right also. The idea that the executive branch can circumvent the entire legislative process by just unilaterally declaring laws is pretty messed up.
Either way, it seems most legal scholars (including the whole of the ABA) believe the program to be illegal. And while there is debate, it is certainly the the cut and dry "just read the law and you will clearly see" argument you are putting forward.
Finkployd
The idea with the Clipper chip was to give the government a backdoor to spy on communications, yes, but unlike they NSA program, they would have still needed warrants to tap in.
Yes, and we know that GW Bush was the first President to ever engaging in spying without warrants (he was the first to proudly admit it though).
The clipper chip was part of a larger initiative which did involve outlawing private research into cryptography, which the NSA deemed to be their sole domain. Go read "The Electronic Privacy Papers" it is quite and interesting collection of position papers and declassified government documents.
The implications for business would also have been huge. No non-US company in their right mind would use such technology on the assumption that the US would naturally be engaging in corporate espionage and passing any helpful titbits along to good old US companies. Not not mention the fact that the US does not "own" cryptography and the rest of the world would certainly have stronger, better, and non compromised algorithms which we would have been outlawed from using. The whole e-commerce thing would probably have happened everywhere BUT the US.
Finkployd
Just wait. They're already turning on Bush, talking about how he's not really conservative. They are, of course, correct, but everyone else started pointing that out six fucking years ago. They don't get to disown him after years and years of sucking up.
This is true, and I was really annoyed at the TV talking heads who just woke up after the election and realized that what the republicans have been doing is not "fiscally conservative" and maybe that is what turned off much of their base. Really? hemorrhaging money like a drunken sailor on shore leave is not fiscally conservative? Who knew?
Unfortunately for most people it seems conservative means "against gay marriage, against terrorists, and against abortions" and as long as those three are met, nothing else matters. Sad state of affairs.
Finkployd
I can't believe I voted for Bush the first time. Had I know he would willing to ignore our constitution and way of life in the name of safety, I would have never considered him.
You and me both, but really it was hard to forsee.
I mean, we just went through the Clinton years where Gore was spearheading the clipper initiative which would have effectively make privacy (and all non clipper crypto) illegal and given the government the ability to spy on everything, while having John Ashcroft emerge as the champion of privacy by leading the opposition to the clipper initiative. I really didn't expect the total and complete 180 on the issue.
Now I know better, both parties are want total access to our lives and supreme executive power (all in the name of keeping us safe). They just pretend to be outraged when the other party is in office and expanding those powers. Believe me, if the democrats take the whitehouse next election they will completely forget about their opposition to any spying and the republicians will suddenly oppose it.
Finkployd
What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda.
Of course, and as we well know the government is totally infallible and would never falsely accuse anyone of being a terrorist or anything else. Even when they know they could get away with it because there is absolutely no independent oversight (gotta keep those activist judges out of the loop, they just complicate matters). We have a strict system of checks and balances in this country, and of course habeas corpus and presumption of innocence applies to us all....unless you are a known terrorists. "Known to who" you ask? "What makes one a known terrorist" you ask? Those are dangerous, un-American questions, boy. You best let the President do his work and keep us all safe and not worry about insignificant details like that.
It is not, as some believe, the government wiretapping phone calls internal to the United States.
Nope, absolutely not. I mean, before someone leaked it we did not think they were wiretapping any calls without properly obtaining warrants, but since it was leaked we know that they are wiretapping international calls without warrants. We still think they are not tapping internal calls this way, and what are the chances we would be wrong again?
And when it comes to the Internet, I'm sure those classified NSA server closets that AT&T has are where they keep the doughnuts.
Finkployd
I'd say there's a chance they're doing this in order to say "oh wow, this is way overboard and shouldn't be done any more" and kill the program, just in time for Democrats to not get their hands on it.
You know, it's funny. I have a lot of friends and family who believe Bush can do no wrong (since we are at war and he is protecting us all) with all of these executive power grabs, but their eyes glass over and faces go black when I ask if they would be comfortable with Kerry or Hillery Clinton bringing those same surveillance and detention powers to bear against gun owners, anti-abortion activists, other conservative groups, etc. Did everyone just forget that Bush (who they oddly trust implicitly) will not be in power forever.
Finkployd
And one reason alone...
"I'm sorry Senator, I cannot comment on the program due to an ongoing Justice Department investigation" - Alberto Gonzales, speaking to the new Democrat controlled congress sometime next year
Finkployd
It was no babe in arms child, it was a teenager, and it was shouting, no physical violence, no mental torture, shouting. I'm a little concerned that you feel that teachers are not allowed to raise their voices at or discipline through raised voice a student.
Response here
Disciplining by shouting (did you watch the video, this was not just a raised voice) accomplishes nothing but decreasing respect for the teacher showing he/she has no control.
I'm pleased that the students are - in this frankly isolated case - being held responsible for their actions.
As am I, but I feel it is a shame that the teacher had to descend to their level. They could have been held responsible for their actions either way.
Not the same thing at all. The student in that case did nothing but act in a relatively courteus manner.
Certainly not exactly the same thing, but the student in that case was certainly not acting in a courteous manner. By all accounts, he was being a dick and attempting to provoke a response (probably not nearly as fierce as he got), just like these kids were. Obviously the response was much more outrageous, but it still stands as another example of authority figures who cannot keep their cool and act appropriately in the face of provocation.
Finkployd
Spoken like someone who has never dealt with children/college students.
:)
... well....repect is a two way street - even if you are a kid, especially if you are a kid.
That is really really funny
You wonder why cops, teachers and other public folk "go off". Try it out sometime. I have been in the trenches, after enough people think they can crap on you and expect you to thank them for doing so
Respect is a two way street, and I have found that (especially with children and teens) letting them see that they got to you and provoked you stooping to their level and yelling/lashing out/etc. is a guaranteed way to lose it.
Did this teacher have no other recourse? No form of discipline at his/her disposal other than yelling? Why not issue a detention, or suspension if warranted? Still being provoked, send the student to the office to deal with the principal. Shows the student that you do not have to deal with their ranting, and shows the rest of the students that you consider it more important to remove disruptions and continue with their education than engage in a pointless yelling match. If that still does not work, you call for school security to remove the student. Ultimately, you will win because even in a worse case scenario, the students is going to be drug out by security/police if they do not stop and do as you ask.
So I will re-iterate my point. If you cannot maintain your cool and handle a disruptive student without screaming back then you should probably not be a teacher. There are plenty of alternatives, but yelling just tells everyone you have lost and have no control.
Finkployd